Monday 25 August 2014

Thank You TimVideos!

It is slightly late but better late than never. My final evaluation results are out and I have been given a pass grade by my organisation. It felt really good to see the mail of successful completion of GSoC after three months of hard work.
I would be very ungrateful if I don't thank my mentor, Joel "Shenki" Stanley. He is probably the coolest mentor and I have dibs on him if I participate next year. Initially I was worried as I didn't have a clear understanding of what to do and in those times shenki was really cool and motivated me which was a big help. I would also like to than our org admin Tim "mithro" Ansell, whose dedication to this org inspires me. Seriously, I would love to sit and talk with him on how he manages to motivate himself to learn and do so many stuff (BTW he works at Google).
I would like to keep contributing for the organisation as and when I get some free time. I also see a lot of my junior getting inspired and wanting to work for this org (one of them had sent a mail on the mailing list some time ago). I am planning to start a OSDG-Hardware group and introduce them to TimVideos. I see a lot of student interested to contribute but don't have sufficient knowledge about things relates to FPGA. So I will be soon (read "when I am free") posting some material and links which will help a raw student who knows only a HDL to become a "hardware developer". Another problem which I found when I discussed with my junior about open source hardware development is the need to have "the hardware" which for us in out case is the FPGA (very expensive considering a country like India). We can slightly mitigate this problem by developing a test suite which helps students who don't have hardware.
The journey of GSoC was great. I have was voted as the most hardworking GSoC intern among my friends who were also interning at GSoC orgs. My learning was really awesome. I feel smarter than most of my batch mates (which will slowly fade away when mid semester exams start). Also the exposure to open source community has restored my faith in humanity because good people still exist and that too in great number. Overall, this experience will remain green in my mind forever.

1 comment: